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1sockchuck writes "Staff at Interxion's London data center are ready to hunker down during the Olympic Games this summer, nestled in snug sleeping pods adjacent to the racks. The arrangement will ensure that the facility will be fully-staffed if London's transit system is taxed by the huge crowds expected for the Games. While staff in many industries might object to a plan that expects them to sleep in their office, data center firms have a primary calling of keeping their facilities operational at all times. Is this too much readiness, or just enough?"

You didn't get the memo? IT people are machines. Typically they're good for between the ages of 21 through 40. You then expend them like a used husk. It's not an issue. There are endless supplies of smart, educated, born and raised on technology people to choose from. Only the elite will last longer without sleep. See, that's the resume' deciding factor there. ARE YOU MACHINE ENOUGH!? Well, are ya?

I'm a "tech" according to my title, but I'm effectively my companies admin for our servers. I'm also the only IT employee. Hourly to boot. On the negative side, even I am on unofficial 24/7 call. The overtime is nice, though they are starting to notice something is off now that we are on a 40 hour maximum lock down and I'm earning whole days off per pay period.

Yeah, if they are the types who actually enjoy their jobs and get along with their coworkers this could be a lot of fun. It might get old towards the end, but I personally wouldn't have a problem with it. If nothing else you'd be much closer as a group after something like that, plus I bet they'll all have fun stories to tell when it's over. Not to mention that if they have a decent employer who knows what they're asking for there'll probably be free food for that time.

The only point of friction might be optimal sleeping spots. No one wants to sleep in the hot aisle, and you'd probably need earplugs.

They could have spent money on load testing and/or extra redundancy before hand to reduce the risk of issues. There are some things that can't be solved by throwing money at it, and this isn't one of them. It just so happened that taking advantage of IT staff was the cheapest solution. Sadly, it usually is.

The first solution would of had long lasting positive implications. What are they going to do during the next big event or even a crisis?... call in more IT staff again?

If I were the employer and I was running this type of high-profile event, I might do both: Redundancy can fail, and load testing only proves what you've tested, after all. Having someone on hand to fix things immediately will prevent a crisis should something unexpected happen.

Of course, as the employee, I'd want extra pay, and other compensation (extended time off after? Extra vacation? An award plaque for sure would not be enough...) for this.

That's what I loved about my Japanese boss back when working for a Japanese company. He was there as long as I was. His rule was that he's the first in the office and the last one to go home. It may sound trivial considering that I didn't really need him for anything (me being technology, him being beancounting), but it is superior in morality to "ok, you stay here 'til midnight and finish that... whatever, I'll be off for some golfing".

That is what I liked about one of my former bosses, before he moved on. I'd get called in on the weekend to do something, or stayed late, and he was often here as well doing something on his own despite being salaried and able to go. There were times I was leaving on a weekend call-in and he'd be coming in. He lived an hour away.

His rule was that he's the first in the office and the last one to go home.

The whole "come early, leave late" thing is actually one of the shittiest parts of working in Japanese culture:

Arriving early for work is common in Japan and shows commitment to colleagues and seniors. It is therefore not uncommon for Japanese workers to arrive 30 to 60 minutes early for work. Additionally, leaving work late expresses the same sort of commitment. Usually, the first person to leave will show his/her apology by saying “Osakinishitsurei shimasu” which translates to “excuse me for going first”. Generally, it is considered bad practice to leave before the boss does.

The practice is starting to wane, but do some Googling and find out how shitty it really is. Apparently, if you come to work on time and leave on time, you're "lazy" no matter how productive you are in the office.

agree, agree, and agree. Its not too different than being on-call. Getting paid to sleep, I would find that awesome. And if something does take a crap, mmmm I'd love to wake up to the smell of overtime pay:)

"Voluntary, compensated and not a long-term thing" you say? So, then, not like this guy [livejournal.com] whose blog as a Katrina-stranded sysadmin was so absorbing...but possibly required reading for.uk admins who might get this gig.

Well, that makes perfect sense! Do you know what a flat in London goes for these days? Twice that if you want climate control! I am thrilled to hear that the datacenter company cares so much about the well being of its employees.

I was just looking at a job out in London, until i compared the cost of living to where I'm am here in the US, the price of a one bedroom flat in London was 3X what I would pay here for a 1200 sq ft 3 bedroom apartment.

$1200 in NYC will get you halfway to owning a one room the size of a closet.

... and up here just about ten miles outside of Scotland's largest and most important city, Glasgow (sorry Edinburgh, I know you've got the Scottish Parliament building and all), the equivalent of roughly $700US gets you a two-bedroom farm cottage with a half acre garden. As an added bonus, London is hundreds of miles away.

I mean come on. We keep our data center staffed 24x7 and do not need anyone sleeping there to do it. This is called simply not paying for what they need. If they need 24x7 support, they simply need 3 shifts of workers.

What I want to know is, why did they choose a data center in the middle of the city? Why is any data center in the middle of the city? The beautiful thing about the internet is that the datacenter can be located where ever you want. Also, very few people are actually needed on-site to keep a data center operational. Most of the people who actually administer the systems could easily work offsite, possibly from home.

if the entire idea is to be prepared for difficulty with mass-transit, then they have screwed up. I was in atlanta for the olympics when everyone panicked over transportation, and there were no problems, and Atlanta is a city that has all kinds of traffic problems when not inundated with foreigners! They may need to have staggered shifts and odd start times to avoid peak traffic, but otherwise this just sounds like panicked stupidity.

Interxion have got their message about how seriously they take their customers uptime and how far they go to plan for eventualities out to readers of Data Center Knowledge (and now to Slashdot). I'd say money well spent, regardless of whether anyone will use the pods for more than publicity shots (or even if Interxion seriously expected them to).

That said, I'm not sure that Atlanta compares to London in terms of aging, and seriously creaking transport infrastructure. e.g. Atlanta has what is supposedly world's airport handling 90m travelers on its five runways; Heathrow handles 70m on just two runways both of which operate at over 98% capacity (plans to add a third were dropped when the current government was elected). The Victorian metro system is similarly overloaded having the distinction of being the oldest in the world while having to serve a population of almost 8 million.

good, it looks like most of the guess work is done. Set your staggered shifts and odd start times to accomodate not being on transit in those giant red blocks. That shows no need to never leave the premises for the duration of the games.

The population of London and Bangkok are similar at ~7M. That chart showed up to a 30minute wait in London! I don't ever remember waiting longer than 4 minutes to take transit in Bangkok, and they're considered a developing country.

Of course they know how shifts work: that's what they're doing now. The problem is the Olympics: most of the large data centres in London are right next door to the main Olympic site. Travelling in or around London, particularly anywhere near East London, during the Olympics is expected to be a complete nightmare. I was warning a previous employer two years ago that they had to start planing for the three months period when it was unlikely any of the staff would be able to travel to the data centre in London (let alone finding somewhere to stay overnight for out of hours work: the London Docklands Travelodge would be right out!)

So yeah, knowing the density of data centres in the area and how close they will be to the Olympics, this sounds like a pretty damn sensible idea, to me.

The Olympics is certainly going to cause some problems for commuters in London. As the poster above noted, this seems like more of a situation where if you can't get home/are worried that you won't be able to get back in tomorrow due to the overload on the transportation network you could crash in one of these things. The other thing, of course, is that the company might be installing them just to get this kind of "look how much we care about your data" type of publicity...

The other thing, of course, is that the company might be installing them just to get this kind of "look how much we care about your data" type of publicity...

This is exactly what they're after.

I worked in Salt Lake City during the Olympics and the local news was talking about how we should expect our commute times to triple, especially if travelling around the venues. My commute went through Salt Lake City and Park City, past a ton of the venues, and I was expecting a nightmare. I ended up leaving 2 hours early and arrived to work 2 hours early the first day. After that I just left at normal time, the nightmare transportation scenario didn't pan out at all..

It's the preeminent world class sporting event that is only held every 4 years for which most of the entire world tunes in. And for which you'd be lucky to get a job at for only once in your lifetime. Wouldn't you expect people to go that little extra distance - If not for the money, but for the pride of saying you contributed?

This isn't for Olympic staffers, just a data center company in London.

Nowhere in London will be immune from the buzz generated by the olympics, and being a part of it (even if it is a small part) will garner pride. And if all goes well, the people working there will have access to see all the olympic media 24/7. And if the data centre crashes and burns, they'll have the knowledge that the whole world is depending on them.And while I have never worked on such a high profile job, 2 years ago I designed and coded the HMI that is used for humidity monitoring on the USS [wikipedia.org]

Why the hell are you even bothering to read and post then? Just move on to the next story, if you are that vehemently opposed to it. What is wrong with you? Let people who enjoy it, enjoy it. You don't enjoy it? Ignore it. Why do you (and many, many other socially disconnected trolls on/.) feel like you must disparage something that doesn't appeal to you? Just leave it alone.

It's great that you enjoy it, but different people like different things, and that's fine. It's fine as long as you don't expect *others* (who may not be interested in the least) to go that extra distance for it.

Personally I find it hard to see past the betrayal of every ideal the Olympic games ever stood for, the cheating in form of drug use, the abuse of children to push some nation's medal lists, the obscene waste of money to build an unnecessary sports infrastructure and the organized corruption which drives the selection of the location.

Obviously they need to lock an IT jockey in each server *CAGE* and they will be responsible for those racks 24/7. Food should be brought them in pellet form and water dispensed from a large water bottle that requires it be licked to release it's Dihydrogen oxide goodness. Replace the floors with screens so they don't need to install any sanitary facilities other than like a garden hose to hose it down every once and a while. Even make it into an attraction and charge fees to tourists to view.

IT jockey's arent people are they? If so this idea is wrong. Now if they were treated with some dignity at least then that's different. Also if you get paid for every hour you're on site or compensated accordingly then I probably wouldn't complain about making piles of money

Considering the Olympics only runs for 2 weeks I can see where a condition of the job would be on call 24/7. Television never sleeps. So why didn't they build hotel rooms into the IT center? Why a bunch of stupid pods?

1) The IT buildings were built before London got the Olympics?2) What are you going to do with hotel rooms afterwards? Let random people sleep in your datacenter overnight?3) It's cheaper.4) It's only 4 weeks (figure week ramp up and cleanup).

But there's money to be made in subletting a flat during an event like the Olympics. I lived in Lake Placid for the 1980 games and my father's department head at the college rented his house for $30k for the two weeks.

This reminds me of how I spent 12/31/1999, sitting in a windowless conference room with a bunch of co-workers, watching the rest of the world have fun.

Meanwhile, because we had all done the legwork months ago, nothing bad happened. If the management has such low faith that their systems will work they should either pay up for the good stuff (hardware, code, etc) or get out of the business. I think you could even keep a Windows 95 machine running for a month.

While staff in many industries might object to a plan that expects them to sleep in their office, data center firms have a primary calling of keeping their facilities operational at all times

I love how the summary neatly dismisses the objections of the employees by citing the goal of the corporation. I can see this working well for a variety of other problems that the data center firms face, but let's just jump to the one the MBAs are salivating over:

While staff in many industries might object to working without pay or benefits, data center firms have a primary calling of keeping their costs low and profits high

Have you ever been a sysadmin? It's not just throwing bodies at a problem. I think most would rather do the overnight thing for a couple weeks than deal with whatever messes a two-week temp would make.

You really think that there will be rooms to rent during the Olympics? Yeah maybe.. but for really big $$$.

But in the previous thread you were going on and on about how people should go to any lengths because they should take "pride" in the Olympics. Guess that only applies to the little people, not to corporations that might actually have to shell out some money.